What reason can one adduce for the fact that, on hearing the phrase : ‘He who desires heaven must offer the fire sacrifice’, one does not perceive the meaning, ‘He who desires heaven must eat dog flesh’? ‒ Abhinavagupta, Abhinavabharati
In my late teens, I was drawn to the writings of Karl Marx, and the work of a number of thinkers in the Marxian tradition. Marx was a journalist for most of his life. At the age of 24, he took over as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, but the periodical was closed down by the authorities not long after his appointment. He defended freedom of expression ardently, having himself felt the brute hand of the censor.
In an eloquent critique of a member of the Assembly of Estates who wanted to restrain the media, he wrote:
At the time I first read these words, a number of nation-states still existed that derived their ideology from Marx’s writings, but there was a chasm between the page and political reality. It was as if Marx had written, “One must perform the fire sacrifice”, and communist government officials had read, “One must eat dog flesh.” Like most Marxists with liberal inclinations, I dismissed existing communist regimes as warped entities with no connection to Marxism, properly understood. I used history to explain why true Marxism had not taken root. Every scrap of evidence that could be marshalled was commandeered, from the support the Allied Powers gave to the White armies during the civil war of 1918, to the US embargo of Cuba that only now seems in the process of being lifted. The history of colonialism and the actions of the United States were fecund sources of exculpatory context in the analysis of why communist regimes turned dictatorial.
Lost in interpretation
Eventually, though, I realised it was futile to explain away solely through history and geopolitics the absence of a single communist nation-state in which civil liberties flourished. I concluded that Marx’s writings, taken as a whole, had an inbuilt tendency to lead to regimes with scant regard for human freedom. You might say the writings encouraged a certain kind of misinterpretation when converted into collective action. A term like “dictatorship of the proletariat” could be endlessly analysed in theory, but in practice became simply “dictatorship”. Marxists were the most ardent and courageous supporters of civil liberties when acting as individuals, but as a group in power, or even a resistance movement of the Naxalite kind, never came close to instituting the values they cherished.
Perhaps, the history of Islam offers something of a parallel, though certainly not an exact one. Over the past decades, violent outrages have routinely been carried out across the globe in the name of Islam, and almost never in the name of any other major religion. The phrase “in the name of” is absolutely crucial here. It is evident that terrible atrocities have been committed by many nations, and by many groups, and often enough, as with the Holocaust or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the perpetrators and victims have belonged to different faiths. But none of the Hindus who murdered Sikhs in 1984 claimed they were doing so out of religious duty, nor did Nazis suggest that exterminating Jews was a goal inspired by their Christianity.
We have to accept that Islam is an exception in this respect, but having done so, we face the equally inescapable and contrasting fact that hundreds of millions of observant Muslims find terrorist acts appalling, and alien to everything they know and feel about their faith.
Endless debate
After each Islamist terrorist assault, people on the Left quote passages from the Quran and Hadith demonstrating tolerance and compassion, while those on the Right employ lines that sound bloodthirsty, the canonical texts of Islam being numerous enough, and varied enough, to serve a very wide variety of interpretations. The Right (and a small section of the Left, especially the Zionist Left) claims that Islam is inherently violent and committed to eliminating infidels. The Left responds by highlighting Islam’s long history of accommodating people of other faiths, and suggests, instead, that atrocities of the Paris and Peshawar variety are the acts of a few crazed individuals who have nothing to do with true Islam. The Right shows through enumeration that the horrors are too numerous and too carefully planned to be so dismissed. The Left takes recourse to contextualisation, using, you guessed it, the history of colonialism and actions of the United States as exculpatory factors. The Right points out that colonialism and US excesses have affected a number of regions with non-Muslim populations, without evoking any similar reaction. And so the debate goes on, endlessly.
The two inescapable facts seem mutually exclusive. But perhaps they can be reconciled through the idea that Islam, like Marxism, encourages a certain kind of misinterpretation. Just as “dictatorship of the proletariat” devolves into mere dictatorship, Jihad, whatever the debate about it at the theoretical level, tends in practice to devolve with alarming frequency into murdering civilians in the name of Islam. It is a misinterpretation, no doubt, but a misinterpretation enabled by the structure and history of Islam in a way it is not by other faiths.
Is this different from saying, as the Right does, that Islam encourages violence? I believe it is. To go back to my parallel example, I remain in awe of the intellectual achievement of Marx, and find much of his writing enlightening, something that would have been impossible if I attributed to him the horrors perpetrated by communist nation-states. Yet, I don’t entirely absolve him of responsibility for those horrors by claiming that communism in practice was never truly Marxist. My attitude to Islam as it relates to Islamist terrorism is similar, neither denunciatory nor apologist, nor even somewhere in between. The idea of “encouraged misinterpretation” doesn’t fit comfortably anywhere on that scale, for within it people never read “offer a fire sacrifice” to mean “eat dog flesh”.
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In my late teens, I was drawn to the writings of Karl Marx, and the work of a number of thinkers in the Marxian tradition. Marx was a journalist for most of his life. At the age of 24, he took over as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, but the periodical was closed down by the authorities not long after his appointment. He defended freedom of expression ardently, having himself felt the brute hand of the censor.
In an eloquent critique of a member of the Assembly of Estates who wanted to restrain the media, he wrote:
“To deny freedom of the press, one must maintain the thesis of the permanent immaturity of the human race. What undergoes development is imperfect. Development ends only with death. Hence it would be truly consistent to kill man in order to free him from this state of imperfection. That at least is what the speaker concludes in order to kill freedom of the press. In his view, true education consists in keeping a person wrapped up in a cradle throughout his life, for as soon as he tries to walk, he falls, and only by falling does he learn to walk. But if we all remain in swaddling-clothes, who is to wrap us in them? If we all remain in the cradle, who is to rock us? If we are all prisoners, who is to be prison warder?”
At the time I first read these words, a number of nation-states still existed that derived their ideology from Marx’s writings, but there was a chasm between the page and political reality. It was as if Marx had written, “One must perform the fire sacrifice”, and communist government officials had read, “One must eat dog flesh.” Like most Marxists with liberal inclinations, I dismissed existing communist regimes as warped entities with no connection to Marxism, properly understood. I used history to explain why true Marxism had not taken root. Every scrap of evidence that could be marshalled was commandeered, from the support the Allied Powers gave to the White armies during the civil war of 1918, to the US embargo of Cuba that only now seems in the process of being lifted. The history of colonialism and the actions of the United States were fecund sources of exculpatory context in the analysis of why communist regimes turned dictatorial.
Lost in interpretation
Eventually, though, I realised it was futile to explain away solely through history and geopolitics the absence of a single communist nation-state in which civil liberties flourished. I concluded that Marx’s writings, taken as a whole, had an inbuilt tendency to lead to regimes with scant regard for human freedom. You might say the writings encouraged a certain kind of misinterpretation when converted into collective action. A term like “dictatorship of the proletariat” could be endlessly analysed in theory, but in practice became simply “dictatorship”. Marxists were the most ardent and courageous supporters of civil liberties when acting as individuals, but as a group in power, or even a resistance movement of the Naxalite kind, never came close to instituting the values they cherished.
Perhaps, the history of Islam offers something of a parallel, though certainly not an exact one. Over the past decades, violent outrages have routinely been carried out across the globe in the name of Islam, and almost never in the name of any other major religion. The phrase “in the name of” is absolutely crucial here. It is evident that terrible atrocities have been committed by many nations, and by many groups, and often enough, as with the Holocaust or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the perpetrators and victims have belonged to different faiths. But none of the Hindus who murdered Sikhs in 1984 claimed they were doing so out of religious duty, nor did Nazis suggest that exterminating Jews was a goal inspired by their Christianity.
We have to accept that Islam is an exception in this respect, but having done so, we face the equally inescapable and contrasting fact that hundreds of millions of observant Muslims find terrorist acts appalling, and alien to everything they know and feel about their faith.
Endless debate
After each Islamist terrorist assault, people on the Left quote passages from the Quran and Hadith demonstrating tolerance and compassion, while those on the Right employ lines that sound bloodthirsty, the canonical texts of Islam being numerous enough, and varied enough, to serve a very wide variety of interpretations. The Right (and a small section of the Left, especially the Zionist Left) claims that Islam is inherently violent and committed to eliminating infidels. The Left responds by highlighting Islam’s long history of accommodating people of other faiths, and suggests, instead, that atrocities of the Paris and Peshawar variety are the acts of a few crazed individuals who have nothing to do with true Islam. The Right shows through enumeration that the horrors are too numerous and too carefully planned to be so dismissed. The Left takes recourse to contextualisation, using, you guessed it, the history of colonialism and actions of the United States as exculpatory factors. The Right points out that colonialism and US excesses have affected a number of regions with non-Muslim populations, without evoking any similar reaction. And so the debate goes on, endlessly.
The two inescapable facts seem mutually exclusive. But perhaps they can be reconciled through the idea that Islam, like Marxism, encourages a certain kind of misinterpretation. Just as “dictatorship of the proletariat” devolves into mere dictatorship, Jihad, whatever the debate about it at the theoretical level, tends in practice to devolve with alarming frequency into murdering civilians in the name of Islam. It is a misinterpretation, no doubt, but a misinterpretation enabled by the structure and history of Islam in a way it is not by other faiths.
Is this different from saying, as the Right does, that Islam encourages violence? I believe it is. To go back to my parallel example, I remain in awe of the intellectual achievement of Marx, and find much of his writing enlightening, something that would have been impossible if I attributed to him the horrors perpetrated by communist nation-states. Yet, I don’t entirely absolve him of responsibility for those horrors by claiming that communism in practice was never truly Marxist. My attitude to Islam as it relates to Islamist terrorism is similar, neither denunciatory nor apologist, nor even somewhere in between. The idea of “encouraged misinterpretation” doesn’t fit comfortably anywhere on that scale, for within it people never read “offer a fire sacrifice” to mean “eat dog flesh”.